


Oppenheimer

by deathindex



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Contemplation, M/M, One Shot, Regret, seeing devils
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-20 07:17:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20223967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathindex/pseuds/deathindex
Summary: Years later, John is going through Arthur’s journal and spots a peculiar figure.A six-armed man. Jack’s name in the paragraph beside it.





	Oppenheimer

_ In front of the blazing sun was the silhouette of a man. _

_ Six arms, six guns, six shooters. _

_ From him and his shadow grew a snake. _

_ It shoots above to eat the sun. _

Arthur started, drenched in sweat.

A dream. It was a dream.

If he blinked, he could still see the faint outline of the six-armed man, but it slowly vanished into the dark. Arthur grimaces, feeling uncomfortable and restless. He pawed for his journal and got up to walk.

The moon was out in full yet with clouds headed its way. 

He paces up a grassy hill. 

Arthur sits down by a boulder, pressing his skin onto the cold stone and closes his eyes. Once again the six-armed man pops into his mind. He can’t find the snake though.

Maybe he should draw the man before he runs off too. He grabs his journal.

As he works Arthur looks off to a town in the distance. He can see lights twinkling from the bars and streets. They look like little stars.

Some philosopher has probably exclaimed that electricity has replaced the constellations and the night and the sleep that went with it.

Maybe it would replace the sun someday.

Or maybe that snake would eat it.

Arthur thought as he knitted his brows, this was all oddly familiar...

Jack had told him something a while back and it rattled in his head once again. 

“Reverend helped me read the newspaper today.” Jack mentioned as they strolled down to the river, fishing gear bobbing. It looked funny towering over the boy.

“Do you know what an atom is?”

“Maybe, I think.” Arthur grunts, thinking back to the man in the dark lab and his electric arcs. All he remembered was feeling lost. “Is it that small stuff everything is made of?”

“Right, even the sun is made of it.” Jack affirmed “They said they found something even smaller though. An ‘electron’, like electricity.”

Arthur scoffed.

“Well what would you know.” 

Arthur isn’t sure what people could do with this knowledge. For most of his life, every problem that came at him he could see and nothing was ever too big. He’d never lost- sure he might fall down for a bit, but always got back up. He didn’t see himself as God but at moments he thought he might just be indestructible. 

Though as of late, his problems had gained a new face, and its wasn’t one he could just shoot. It was Dutch- something had shifted in him and Arthur could not quite see what it was but he could feel it crawling. For one, while Dutch was unarguably leader, the gang still had a presumed democracy in what they did. But whatever snapped in Dutch, probably after Blackwater, made him impossible to work with. It felt like swimming upstream.

It was the symptom of something greater but all the harder to make shape of.

And whatever invisible force had changed in Dutch, it was proving to be deadly. The friendly bodies were piling up while the money slipped away and it hadn’t scared Arthur enough until now. Thinking back again to the man with the electricity, maybe Arthur _ should _feel threatened by an invisible force he could not see nor understand. All the warning signs must have been there, but Arthur is blind to subtle matters. 

_ For all his strength and aggression, a snake could kill him swiftly in his sleep. _

But he didn’t want to think about that. Arthur wanted to believe he was invincible and if Jack was right then what threatened him, what was invisible and unkillable like God, was also what made up every atom in his body. 

“So does that mean me and the sun are related?” Arthur jokes. 

Jack giggles. “Maybe.”

They fish but catch nothing.

Back at camp Arthur reads the newspaper Jack had mentioned. His eyes glaze over the words and wonders how people come up with ‘glass bottles that reveal the nature of the universe’, as the report puts the Electron Experiment. There is a picture of a glowing ball trapped in a bottle that looks like the sun. It is surrounded by arrows and question marks. A wonderful portrait of himself, Arthur thinks.

But all the reading gives him a headache. Or makes it worse, one or the other. He hadn’t felt good as of late. He feels like his head is going to split open.

He imagines the sun being cracked open and exploding, engulfing the world in flames.

  
  


\---

Years later, John is going through Arthur’s journal and spots a peculiar figure. The six-armed man. Jack’s name in the paragraph beside it. 

He wonders if it’s from a story Jack mentioned to Arthur. 

He remembers how good Arthur was with young Jack. He was surprisingly patient and guiding almost against the nature of his work. He would have been a good father, John thinks.

Should have been.

A lot of things should have been.

He reads the passage by the drawing and finds it strange. It is not an observation of the natural world like most of his drawings but instead the recording of a dream. _ A six-armed man with an unseen snake that eats the sun _. Arthur supposed the image sprang from ‘The Electron’, a news story Jack had mentioned. The way he talks about it is more biblical and paranoid than any of his entries at the time, and Jack’s imagination had rubbed off on him in this one.

Arthur concludes that he is the unseen predator that is stalking himself. John doesn’t know what to make of it. The book feels like a hot ember suddenly. 

Later that evening John puts the journal in a store box Abigail had bought for valuables.

He doesn't want to think about it. 

\---

In the following years, periodically the Six-Armed Man appears. If Abigail sleeps beside him, then sun behind the Man slowly turns into a Woman cowering beneath him. Still no snake though. He expects it to appear eventually, maybe gripping the moon between its teeth, but it never does. Makes for a good story though, he should tell Jack about it. But he never does.

Six months later he proposes to Abigail properly. Promises to marry her under God and makes good on his promise when he shoots down Micah Bell. In the words of Sadie Adler _ I have a wedding to attend _. He wonders how those words would have sounded coming out of Arthur.

John would like to think the Six-Armed man was Micah, or maybe even Dutch after he watches him fall back off the cliff, but still the face stays dark and featureless. Maybe the Six-Armed Man is death or the Devil. The Woman disappears. The Man grows tired.

And when Edgar Ross shoots him down, he dreams for the last time.

Then, the Man is asleep and the snake finally appears.


End file.
